A few days ago, a friend from a company I used to work for said to me something along the lines of “{Company Executive} asked me how you are doing”, and I couldn’t give anything other than a pithy “I’m alive” answer.
I find that since I generally live an unconventional life, it’s a pain to describe how I’m doing. It’s not a straightforward “Oh, you know, still working as a freelance developer/consultant/solutions architect” for me, because I don’t really identify that much anymore with what work I’m doing or who I’m employed by. For this reason, I rarely talk about my work situation, even with my closest friends. On more than one occassion, I’ve had a friend that I talk to (online) almost every day be surprised to find out I was no longer working with {This company they knew I was working with}, and had not been working with them for months now.
It gets worse because of my “unconventional” situation where things that are normally a priority for other folk - like having regular full-time work - are not a priority for me, so people won’t easily understand my siutation.
Slight tangent: I’m not surprised to find that this wasn’t the first time I tried to write a post with this title, nor that the older post was also an attempt to summarize my current status because it’s often hard for people to grok.
Anyway, I kind of wanted to answer the previous query with “Just follow my blog or my twitter so you know what I’m up to”, but (a) I don’t think that’s very effective; and (b) even my blog isn’t an indication of my high-level situation (it does let you know things like what boardgames I was playing last week or what my top tracks on Spotify for the year were though, if that helps.)
Instead, I followed the advice given by Derek Sivers: I created a now page. Basically it’s a fixed page that I can point to at any time that gives a summary of what’s up with my life. I’ll just update it when something major changes I guess. I’ll also add it to the site menus somewhere.
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